


feather on the clyde

by mishcollin



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Fallen Castiel, Fluff and Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-11
Updated: 2013-09-11
Packaged: 2017-12-26 06:25:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/962662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mishcollin/pseuds/mishcollin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cas is in the wind again. Again, Dean waits for him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	feather on the clyde

Dean's slumped over, almost passed out in a hospital chair, when his phone buzzes. He shakes himself painfully awake, wincing at the harsh glare of the fluorescent lights, before he flips open his phone and squints.

It's from Charlie, a two-word text that makes Dean's whole stomach twist up in knots.

_Found Cas._

Dean jolts up from his chair and is punching Charlie's number before he really processes the words, and he kicks up a fast, agitated pace that draws stares from surrounding nurses. He can feel his hands are trembling, just slightly, with adrenaline, and sucks in two deep, slow breaths. Could be a dead end. It could be a dead end.

But at least Cas isn't dead, right? This means Cas isn't dead, if Charlie got a signal.

"What's up, home-slice?" Charlie's voice crackles through on the line.

"Where is he?"

"Jeez, you're one for niceties, aren't you?"

"Charlie."

"Alright, sorry. I tracked his phone to a laundromat in Glenwood Springs, Colorado."

Dean mouths the name again, burning the words to memory.

"But, Dean--" Charlie's cautioning, "he's probably long gone by now. The phone's position hasn't changed in a few hours so I'm taking he left it there or something."

"How long's the drive?"

"About eight hours."

Dean's heart sinks to the soles of his feet. He can't do a sixteen-hour round-trip drive, not with Sammy on the mend. But this is his only lead on Cas, and if there's even a slight chance he can get to him…

"I'm gonna talk it out with Sam," Dean tells Charlie after a few minutes of heavy contemplation. "Thanks, Charlie."

"No problem. Keep me posted."

Dean hangs up and heads back to the bench. Sits for a moment, thinks, before he gets up again, restlessly, and opens the door to Sam's hospital room.

Sam's awake, looking battered and bruised, pale and shaken, but alive, and he cracks a wan smile when he sees Dean hovering in the doorway.

"Heard you talking outside. You got a lead on Cas?"

"Yeah, but it's an eight hour drive to Colorado."

Sam stares at him. "And…?"

"And you need someone here with you, given you're recovering from a near-death experience."

Sam sits up straighter and looks so righteously indignant that Dean thinks he might break something. "You're fucking kidding me, right, Dean? This is  _Cas_ we're talking about, and you're gonna sit behind with your thumb up your ass to play babysitter to me? When I've got a whole staff of people  _paid_ to do that catering to my every damn whim?"

"Uh…" Dean says, not quite sure what to do with that outburst.

"This is Cas," Sam says again, raising his eyebrows and sinking back into the hospital chair with a slight wince. "For God's sake, Dean. Put me on the back burner for  _once_  in your life."

Dean blinks in surprise before he nods once, shakily, and he knows, somehow, that Sam had said all that shit for his sake, if the way that Sam's tiny smile is any indication. "You sure, Sammy?"

"I'll be fine for  _one day_ without you, Dean, jeez." He waves a dismissive hand and turns his head to the side, closing his eyes. "Bring Cas home."

\---

The drive to Colorado is agonizingly long, silent without Sam and just the drone of music to fill his head, and eventually after Dean runs through his tapes a few times, he turns off the radio, too aggravated to listen to the same songs over and over again. The space in his head, then, is left vacant to worry about Cas, worry about Sam, worry about whatever new apocalypse is headed their way at the speed of a freight train.

He calls Charlie once or twice, just to hear her voice and to have someone to talk to, and he calls Sam once to check in. He tries Cas' cell probably twenty times, until his phone is drained of battery and dies in his hand.

"Motherfucker," Dean growls, casting the phone into the shotgun seat, and he spends the rest of the two hours toying with a napkin with a scrawled address on it, and a simple set of directions once he made it into Glenwood Springs.

When the sign for Glenwood Springs flashes past him, Dean feels his pulse accelerate until his palms are clammy, slipping on the wheel, and he jiggles his knee, fiercely telling himself that this could be a dead end, that Cas won't be here, that this could be for nothing, don't get your hopes up, because when are things ever this easy with Cas?

He doesn't know what he was expecting, Cas or otherwise, but it's certainly not to find the entire laundromat taped off and swarming with Glenwood Springs police force. They're talking into their radios urgently and shooing people away from the area, and Dean feels a strange, bile-like feeling rising in his throat as he parks the car and fishes around for one of his fakes.

"FBI," he greets one of the officers once he clambers out of the car. The officer examines his badge and nods. "Can you explain what's happened here, officer?"

"Well, I'd assume you'd already know," the officer replies, squinting at him suspiciously.

"I only know the vague details," Dean says with a clipped, cold smile. "So if you wouldn't mind filling me in."

"Victim found inside, stab-wound to his side. Looks like he bled out. Nobody seems to know the type of blade that did the damage though."

Dean feels the world drop out from underneath him, like something had tilted on its axis and left him spinning. He takes a deep, punched-out breath, masking his reaction from the officer, dropping his eyes. "Physical description?"

"Ermm, unidentified male, white, dark-haired, late 30's."

"If you'd excuse me for a minute," Dean says, pushing past him and heading up the steps of the laundromat, the red-blue lights of the police cars flickering in his vision and his eyes all hot and blurry around the edges. There's a weird, vice-like pain clenching in his chest, sharp and fluctuating, and it makes it hard to breathe.

"Cas," Dean says under his breath, "I swear to God, if you, Cas," as he swings open the door to the laundromat, bracing himself for the worst.

The first thing he notices is the long path of blood, spread out from the body, and Dean's eyes numbly follow the trail, heart thundering…

It's not Cas.

Not Cas, not Cas, not Cas.

Dean has to sit down a moment and he buries his face in his hands, blowing out a sharp, jagged breath into his palms.

"Sir? Are you alright?" one of the officers examining the corpse asks him.

"Fine," Dean says, and his voice sounds detached from his body. "Just a little nauseous around blood, that's all."

"How'd you get involved in a line of work like this then?" the officer asks with a grin.

"Dunno," Dean says with a shaky smile, and he can feel the relief infusing feeling back into his limbs, trickling in warm bursts, making him strangely giddy. He stares at the dead man, a long-nosed, pale guy in his mid-thirties, and he should be asking who, how,  _why,_ but all he can process is,  _Not Cas. It's not Cas._

"Do you guys have any leads on what could've done this?" Dean asks when he's recovered himself, and then inwardly kicks himself as the officers toss him quizzical looks at the word "what."

"We think we have a pretty good one," the female officer says, and with a gloved hand she holds up a pile of wet clothes. Dean's gut does that funny dropping feeling again, like he's suddenly gone over a huge crest on a roller coaster. "We found these in one of the washers and dryers. Whoever it was left the phone in the pocket and it went through the wash."

It's a trenchcoat,  _the_ trenchcoat, and Cas' slacks, his socks, his suit jacket.

Dean stands slowly and walks over to the officers, staring down at the trenchcoat with a sick, dizzying feeling of deja vu before taking the sopping bundle from her hands. To this, both of the officers protest.

"That's evidence in a homicidal investigation, sir, you can't take that."

"The last time I checked," Dean says crisply, and shifts the pile of clothes into the cradle of one arm so he can hold up his badge, "the FBI has jurisdiction."

The female officer clenches her jaw as the other officer argues, "That's our only lead on this case. You can't just take it."

"I'm sorry, sir, this is a federal investigation and I have license to gather evidence for the Department of Justice however I damn well please. The Bureau will conduct further investigations into a homicide and if they decide to extend the investigation, all evidence will be retained for the court. Do I make myself clear?"

Both of the officers nod, grudgingly, and step back from him.

"Have a good day, officers," Dean says, and leaves with a strange emptiness in his chest.

\---

It's an even longer ride back to Lebanon. The trenchcoat and the rest of Cas' wet clothes sit in the shotgun seat. Dean can't shake the feeling, all the way home, like he's mourning something he hasn't lost yet.

\---

Weeks pass without a word from Cas, blending into months and a stifling cadence of normalcy. Sam comes home, which Dean celebrates by making burgers and buying Sam's favorite beer, but there's something missing in the bunker, something all its inhabitants can easily identify but don't dare voice. 

Kevin is quiet, too quiet, and stays out of the Winchesters' hair; he spends most of his time holed up in his room playing video games, reading, or sleeping, sometimes doing research for the boys on the fallen angel conflict.

Sam recovers slowly but surely, to Dean's relief. But he hates the way Sam tiptoes around him, giving him these stupid wounded looks and asking, once every other day in a quiet, empathetic voice, "Do you want to talk about it, Dean?"

Dean shuts down talk about Cas, closing Sam and Kevin out if they ask about him. There's no use in talking about him; it's not going to change anything.

In the meantime, they deal with fallen angels. And demons. And all the other stuff in between. Everything's the same. Except where it's not.

Charlie calls a few times to check up, apologizes profusely for being unable to find Cas, like this is all somehow her fault. She promises to come visit and take Dean to a convention, to get his mind off things, and hangs up.

Dean doesn't tell Sam about the trenchcoat, or Cas' other clothes. He keeps them buried safely in his closet and tells himself that he forgets they're there. One night, when Dean surfaces from a nightmare, his shirt glued to his skin with sweat and his pulse a loud jackhammering in his ears, he makes his way blindly over to the closet and digs the coat out, just keeps it in his lap for a minute, clenching his fingers in and out of the familiar fabric. He thinks of the man lying dead in the laundromat, blood flowering out and around him, and wonders if somewhere, Cas is laying like that, spread-eagled and bloody, eyes glazed.

The nightmares get worse and every night, Dean's bed is cold. He sleeps with like ten blankets but he can never feel his toes in the morning, and sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, racking with shivers.

Sam's concerned but optimistic, saying things every once in a while like, "We'll find him, Dean," but Dean always snaps something like, "Why the fuck do you think this has to do with him?" and stalks off to his room for peace and quiet, or possibly a drink.

Somehow, what's worse, when Dean allows himself to think about it, is that he'd been  _so close._ He'd probably missed Cas in Colarado by just hours, and something about that just  _needles_ at him.

He sometimes wonders, if Cas is out there and alive, if he ever thinks about Dean, if he even  _wants_ to come back. He's probably up to his ears in angels, Dean thinks dully, and besides, it's not like Cas ever really needed him anyway.

Sometimes he calls Cas' number, just to hear that stupid, "I don't understand, why do you want me to say my name?", like that's going to make things any better. Dean feels hopelessly stuck between two spheres, a pillar of hope and a pillar of loss. He doesn't know whether to silently hold out for Cas' return or to mourn him, and doesn't that make him feel like a fucking military wife?

But the world never stopped for the Winchesters and it was never going to, not that Dean would expect it to, and things go on, days blending into each other like patches in an old quilt, one indecipherable from the next.

It's been three months since the angels fell and Sam and Dean are on a hunt in Kansas City, some innocuous ghost story about Union Station that had gotten a bit ugly when the city had started doing construction on the station's lower level. Sam and Dean wrap up the case fairly easily and stop to eat lunch before heading out.

"Jesus," Dean says on the way out, "who would've thought this place would be so fucking packed? Haven't they ever heard of cars, or like, a bus?"

Sam snorts.

Suddenly, through the crowd, Dean spots a flash of color, and he turns and stops dead in his tracks.

He's seeing things, surely, hallucinating. Wouldn't be the first time. There's been hundreds of instances these past few months where he stopped the car, stopped walking, dropped  _everything,_ because he thought he'd seen Cas. Yet….

There's a man leaned up against one of the building's outside columns, in a ragged maroon jacket and a baggy pair of jeans, arms crossed, dark hair. White male. Late thirties.

"Cas," Dean says. He hadn't meant to say it.

Sam whips around at that, eyes scanning the crowd. "What?"

"Cas," Dean says again, louder, and then yells it. " _Cas!_ "

Cas' head snaps up instantly at the sound of Dean's voice, practically jack-knifing off the column as his wide eyes survey the crowd.

Dean starts running, shoving through the throngs of endless people, and people stare but Cas catches his eye and mouths, "Dean?" and heads right toward him, pushing past people until they meet in the middle and in the same breath, Dean says, "You  _stupid_ son-of-a-bitch," and pulls him into a hug that's way too restrictive, way too intense for public, but Cas is clinging onto him and breathing fast in his ear and saying, "Dean," over and over again, like he can't believe Dean's here, that he's real.

Dean should let go but he doesn't, gripping onto Cas long after it's socially appropriate, his heart banging against his chest where it's pressed to Cas'. He can feel Sam staring, possibly grinning, from a ways back, but he hangs back, giving them their space.

"Where the hell have you been?" is the first question Dean asks when he pulls away, and he pores over Cas' face, absorbing the changes. Cas' eyes are heavy and tired but the same shade of blue as they were before, and there are smudges of dirt smeared under his cheekbones and scruff shadowing his jaw. Unfamiliar wrinkles crowd the corners of his eyes, dark crescents bruise-like on his lower eyelids. He seems smaller, somehow, than he did before.

"Around," Cas answers, and he wets his lips. They're as dry and chapped as they ever were. "I was trying to get back to you, truly, Dean, but I'm being hunted, and…I couldn't bring that to your and Sam's front doorstep, I just couldn't."

"The dead guy in Colorado Springs," Dean recalls as the pieces start to click together. "He was trying to kill you?

"One of my fallen brothers, yes," Cas says with a funny look. "How…did you…?"

"It doesn't matter." Dean takes a deep breath. He still feels warm and strange all over. "Will you--I mean, can you--we want you to--I mean, you don't hafta--"

"Can I come home with you?" Cas asks, filling in for the words Dean can't seem to articulate.

Dean nods, and he doesn't mean to say it, but he does. "Only if you stay."

Cas stares, and a strange, small eternity seems to transpire between them, a galaxy of unspoken words, before Cas nods slowly. Says, softly, "Okay." Smiles.

\---

For the first time in months, with Cas tucked against him, Dean is warm when he sleeps.

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from the Passenger song. :')


End file.
